Time For A Slow-Word Movement

Trevor Butterworth
, ContributorScience and evidence in the public interestOpinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

A decade ago, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, two grandees of American journalism, warned of a crisis: The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal had revealed a news media publishing at "warp speed," discarding probity for prurience and embracing a non-stop news cycle of aggression, allegation and assertion where once facts were checked and sources confirmed before ministering scandal to the public. Much like a beleaguered Scotty on a hurtling Starship Enterprise, Kovach and Rosenstiel warned that democracy "cannot take it."

As crises go, the Clinton-Lewinsky imbroglio is now an absurdist, bathetic footnote to what was in fact significant about that era: the evolution of finance in a culture of deregulation and the evolution of jihadism against the United States. Still, the idea that the media was operating at warp speed was a powerful summation of much that was wrong with the media in the 1990s, but it was not conceptually powerful enough to confront the kind of acceleration that would follow in the naughties. There is a deer in headlights quality to David Halberstam, writing in the forward to Kovach and Rosenstiel's book, that 1998 was "the worst year for American journalism since I entered the profession 44 years ago"; he was still writing in an age that had not experienced the power of the blogosphere, signed onto Facebook or re-tweeted Demi Moore's ass. It had not yet suffered the consequences of giving away what newspapers had once charged for, endured the erosion of copyright and the value of written labor, or faced a moment on YouTube that could mutate into catastrophe for a political campaign.

None of this existed. At the time, in journalism schools and conferences, the villain of new media was Matt Drudge, the Genghis Khan of the Internet, burning the gates and the power of gatekeeping. And what did Drudge turn out to be 10 years later? Reactionary--but not exactly in a way that lived up to his acres of bad press. He was retro with a twist, sticking to a page layout that would seem familiar to a 19th-century newspaper reader; favoring the garish and grotesque in a way that would have gladdened a Joseph Pulitzer or a William Randolph Hearst; and, oddly, doing more to encourage the reading of traditional journalism on the Internet than anyone else. He also exposed audiences to a more conservative-inflected reporting, largely through linking to stories in the British press (which has a much greater, albeit more moderate, conservative media).

If Drudge was gossipy, he was no more so than Walter Winchell had been in the 1930s and '40s--and hadn't Winchell grasped the evil of Hitler far quicker than the reigning grandee of American journalism, Walter Lippmann? Drudge was also considerably less gossipy than new-media mogul Nick Denton turned out to be--but then, who anticipated Gawker and its vision of the world in the late 1990s?

If the moral of this story is that media commentary is like navigating in fog, the crisis of journalism is, at this point, sufficiently real to be seen as part of a wider conceptual crisis brought about by new-media technology: a crisis that is located, primarily, in the cognitive effects of acceleration and its cultural backwash. In short, a relentless, endless free diet of fast media is bad for your brain. Generation
Google
--those who have never known a world without the Internet--it turns out, not only cannot use Google effectively, they don't even know enough about how to search for information to know they can't use Google effectively. The idea that the kids are whizzes at multimedia tasking is a platitude confected by middle-aged techno gurus to peddle their expertise as explainers of generational difference. In fact, relentless multitasking erodes executive function. And while the brain may not be overloaded by 34 gigabytes of brute information a day, it appears that too many of these mental quanta are the equivalent of empty calories. PlayStation and texting need to be balanced out by reading novels, handwriting (for old-fashioned digital dexterity) and playing with other live people if you want your child to develop to be an effective, skill-acquiring, empathetic adult.

Unfortunately, the Internet offered such an intoxicating sense of liberation from liberal cant, corporate dominion and plain old superficiality to many on the right and the left--constituencies that were often the most intellectually exercised about the state of journalism--that each seemed to treat new media as a new way of doing politics. The power to settle old scores, lobby or build an idealized democratic media composed of citizen journalists obscured the underlying damage created by relentless acceleration. Those who complained "just didn't get it." How could an information superhighway not be good? Well, if--as with a real highway--it destroys something irreplaceable, a vital ecosystem essential to human life. As Paul McGuinness, U2's manager, said to the Financial Times, the trend he most hoped for in 2010 was that technology companies would realize that their future depends on the rights of publishers, writers, designers and artists.

The answer to so much casual destruction is to stop hand-wringing and rebrand traditional media, including journalism. The problem with most journalists protesting about the nobility of journalism is that it doesn't sound convincing. Whining doesn't really offer itself up as a convincing branding strategy; and the political justification for journalism, namely the vital constitutional role of the media in American democracy, sounds both sanctimonious and pretentious--simply reminding people of the effluvial stench of journalism's sins instead of the grandeur of its triumphs. The public needs something to believe in rather than rail against, something elegantly simple and bipartisan that has sufficient aesthetic compulsion to sound pleasurable rather than penitential.

Such a concept exists, adapted from radical Marxism's greatest, smartest and most paradoxical contribution to global culture: slow food. The slow food movement began in Piedmont, Italy, as an attempt to preserve local traditions, not least of which was the local wine (one early slogan was "Barolo is democratic, or at least can be so"). A bad meal at a workers' social club--the pasta was cold, the salad was dirty, writes Geoff Andrews in The Slow Food Story--enraged the budding eco-gastronomes and led, initially, to internecine conflict with more orthodox Italian Communists, who were unsympathetic to seeing the workers' struggle as one for al dente pasta and the bourgeois pleasures of the table. But the sense that the emerging virus of fast life was eroding a qualitatively superior way of living and eating had an unstoppable momentum, and the hyperlocalism of eating less and eating better became its own, far more beneficent political movement.

The idea of consuming less, but better, media--of a "slow word" or "slow media" movement--is a strategy journalism should adopt. It will be painful, as it involves thinking about media as something sustainable, local and (hardest of all for hard-bitten hacks) pleasurable. But as the historian Michael Schudson has argued, it's simply unrealistic to expect the public to read newspapers as a daily personal moral commitment to democracy. Instead, look to what Dave Eggers has brilliantly shown with the San Francisco Panorama, namely that the physical quality of a newspaper and the aesthetic pleasure of reading can make people so excited about journalism that they'll buy it--not just conceptually, but in terms of parting with cash.

Eggers could well be the Alice Waters (queen of American slow foodies) of the news media, McSweeny's its Chez Panisse. But even more explicit in advocating principles of slow media is Monocle, a luxuriously bound and produced monthly by Tyler Brûlé, a journalist turned creative guru and, crossing Jane Jacobs with John Ruskin, an apostle of a 21st-century, globally aware aestheticism in everything from a cup of espresso to urban planning and airline uniforms.

As Brûlé recently said of Twitter, echoing one of the slogans that started the slow food movement, "There is a kind of social media that really works for business and play. It's called having a glass of wine." Touché--and with that recommendation in mind, onward to a new decade.

Trevor Butterworth is the editor of STATS.org, an affiliate of George Mason University that looks at how numbers are used in public policy and the media. He writes a weekly column for Forbes.